Profile Cleanup

The main difference between 2000/XP and Vista/7 is that there are additional references to the profiles stored on a machine stored in the registry (HKLM). Under XP/2000 it was possible to just delete profiles from C:\Documents and Settings in order to clear up disk space from cached profiles. Doing this under Vista/7 will result in 'Profile not found' errors on login.

Rather than muck about in the registry, there is an alternate interface for deletion:

Right click on Computer and Select Properties

Select Advanced System Settings

On the advanced tab, click the 'Settings' button under User Profiles

Delete erroneous profiles through the resulting interface

Please note, that in the instance we get folder redirection working, the chances of actually needing this is slim.

Roaming Profiles

Under Vista/7, Roaming profiles have also been changed. There is now a 30MB hard limit set for the User's Appdata\Roaming folder and the OS will attempt to keep non-essential data out of this folder (ie, it's mainly the User's ntuser.dat and some Microsoft settings). Most everything else lives in Appdata\Local or Appdata\LocalLow. This is a fundamental change from the way roaming profiles used to work (ie, everything in the user's home was synced). To accomodate the change, users now require an additional profile share on the samba server, specifically %ProfilePath%.V2 where the V2 is case sensitive.

Required changes

For access across multiple machines, the AppData folder should be shifted onto the user's /away space with folder redirection.

Caveats

A lot of user settings from 2000/XP will not move across cleanly. Depending on your point of view this might not be a bad thing (TM).

Folder Redirection

Is now the recommended practice for sticking most everything else on the network. Requires redirects for each folder under the user's profile. It might work to just redirect /Users/<user> to H:\ but that will require some testing

Caveats

Windows handles folder redirection as pseudo NTFS joins. Every redirected folder will get a $RECYCLE.BIN$ folder created in it. If we use the existing Desktop etc folders this might get annoying

Vista/7 do not support NTPolicy and folder redirection is not available in local machine policy. May require a logon script to run on the first login.